


Magic

by Mer_des_Miroirs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, Romance, Romanticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 23:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mer_des_Miroirs/pseuds/Mer_des_Miroirs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom Marvolo Riddle was a splitting image of his father in a more ways than one. </p><p>She was an absurdity. She was the most wonderful thing he ever knew. </p><p>A story of the man, who died thrice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magic

  _“_ _When thus I hail the Moment flying:_

_"Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!"_

_Then bind me in thy bonds undying,_

_My final ruin then declare!”  
_

Decidedly, he slashed his charcoal against paper, breaking the twig in two. Swiftly, he gave it grey shrunken leaves and moss covered stones. Nearby a bird hunted, its beak a pendulum against holey tree bark. Much to his mother’s chagrin, Tom has taken to draw colourless breaths in the spiral bound notebooks, only halting as much as to realise structure and depth. The pigment powder smeared across Tom’s long flawless fingers, smudged meticulous sketches with a veil of insistent shadows, breaking them intangible and alive. 

Tom moves further into the forest, where he knows the tree trunks stand an amphitheatre with the algae fuelled lake, apathetically boring. Tom glides, the patterns of light and shadow manifesting on silk clad arms. From the other direction, a girl comes.

She is beaten and underfed like Tom was told the lowlifes from the town usually are, but seldom in the country, where everyone with a little brain can grow a meal. Her hair is a varying length, as if cut by a knife of limited sharpness. Tom bets that her left leg is slightly shorter than the right one. Disappointed Tom counts the same amount of fingers everywhere. Silently, Tom approaches the destination point, as little thing undresses near the lake intent on taking a bath.

Her face is a glaring absurdity. Her artist a cruel genius, as he brings randomness into the human line. Tom grips a piece of the charcoal, drawn to the child’s sweet pout, as if a paltry beast’s grin; to the altering distance between lowered eyes and the petal like nose. Her artist, thoughtfully ignoring the demands of symmetry, he forces Tom to watch every crease and turn if Tom desires to emulate. There is no facilitation in the golden ratio, no simplicity.

Where Tom hides his tonalities behind a marble mask, she is open and pure. 

She sheds layers of cloth, enters green water with hands and legs of yellow and blue. She washes within swirling mud, dirtying mud. She loses the streams of violet-blue and green-yellow, until her skin is an ashen grey. She sings a sweet song with a raspy voice as thin as herself. She is innocent, but tainting, tainting with her mere touch. She is the heavenly contradiction.

Tom trembles, as the girl goes, leaving his sight, dragging her feet over the last year’s vegetation. Tom breathes acid fumes, sweet-bitter. Unable to reign himself, Tom drowns one hand in the rainbow water and presses hand against lips. Tom gags at the taste of pure sin.

***

Next day, Tom lets his feet dangle from his seat next to the bearded coachman, as they drive to the pastel coloured train station. Tom, at nineteen, is to depart for his first year at the eulogised King’s College of Cambridge. He is to study law, certainly politics, some literature and arts - as such is covered by the College’s superior library. As an amalgamation of exquisite beauty, intelligence and charm, Tom is a subject to the royal scholarship that he cared sufficiently to win. Not exactly in a financial need, Tom feels no compassion with his meagre competitors that to excel failed. Tom is bored.

Few things nowadays can keep Tom’s attention. Not his mother’s strident voice and his father’s gilt times.  He cares neither for the fashionable girls from the village, not for the sophisticated heiresses from as far as a day’s ride. Little Thing, however, evades clean-cut logic. Old coachman pities Little Thing, as she is ugly, of no mother and money. “The Gaunts”, the coachman declares – “They are always around and always mad”. But Tom feels, there is a system to this insanity. A secret that foolish peasants stay oblivious to. Tom has an eye sharper than many. Tom saw Little Thing.

***

Months pass, restless months. Tom is frequently pale and ailing. Tom is obsessed with taste. Long evenings Tom scribbles from obscure Latin texts recipes of healing and wonder. Tom tries crocodile dung and iris root. He snuffles upon on a full moon incinerated bat bones, as his fellow students smoke opium. He savours, regurgitates, rejects. There are many poisons to get acquainted with, Tom accepts, but Little Thing is a special one.

***

Young summer and Tom is back to the hot, humid countryside. The sky is covered by a deep blemish. Tom’s hair is shoulder length, whirling in tempest. Tom rides in the future rain on a hot-blooded stallion, black as the common cloud. Tom takes his chances, but Lady Luck is riding with Tom, as he spots foolish girl several yards away from home. Tom speeds up. Tom halts with the stallion’s full height, as its forelegs dance instants away from the girl’s face. Tom twists worthy of the Viennese dressage school, thankful for the dry scorching soil. Tom leans down, where the girl’s face is –

“And how many miserable years are to this miserable thing?” Tom nods at the chatting coachman.

“Won’t say for sure, but the hag, her mother, was heavy three years after the turn of the century and seven years too...”

She is thirteen, thinks Tom, small and malnourished...  Down Tom leans –

“Are not you hurt, my dear?”

The corners of Tom’s mouth rise, as he flashes her a pitiless smile, sees her eyes. From the milky thunder and sky thrown tears there are her eyes of dark forest green, widened in shock-fear. Tom wanders within shades of ivy and wine, follows in darkness, as there is ever night in her eyes, in her slick loony face. They drown in heavenly tears, wet and unyielding, and Tom departs without a further word.

***

Year after year Tom comes to the family manor and the forest his family owns. In the forest, there dwells an enchantress. Tom watches. 

Nothing of notion changed.

She wades with twigs stuck to her dress, green leaves in her hair, cobwebs for her sleeves. On her feet she wears patterns of dirt, on her tongue – the songs strange and eerie.

She has wild, wild eyes, as from her wooden stick emerge light, ice and fire. She whispers with snakes. She brushes her serpentine hair. Recently, she comes no more, but it is Tom’s final year and Tom waits.

***

Tom returns to a hearty welcome. Wine flows. Cecilia is tall, slender, fair curls, predictable visage. She is Mrs. Riddle’s choice to become Mrs. Riddle. She is fluent on a horseback and quotes Housman.

Tom insists on excessive tours around his lands and the other’s. Tom is intent to remedy the situation. Cecilia quotes Locke, Tom favours Hobbes.

***

Merope is the younger of two children. It is in the harvest season, that Tom suffers the presence of the girl’s brother. This brother is an unkempt rogue, hissing at Tom in a wild arm agitation. Tom politely informs Mr. Gaunt junior, that no, he not understands.

Tom is requested - and in an anxiously enraged manner, to stay pointedly away from the intruder’s imbecile of a sister. Tom considers to laugh the matter off. Only a madman mingles the tramp daughter’s name with such of the squire’s son. Tom, Merope. Merope. Tom.

“No”, smiles Tom. “I do not think so”.

The savage sputters his weak arguments of personal superiority, all naught in the face of Tom’s clever remark.

“Why should you even bother... Coming here, shouting, if not, apparently, your sister prefers me...”    

And bad loser, the pest twirls plain wooden stick, he pointedly, previously clutched in his hairy hands. Magic wand..., smiles Tom. Show me!

It slices through air and skin, its effect immediate. Tom laughs through a lacerated lung, as Tom suffocates. As expected, the culprit flees. Tom dips his finger in blood, paints on the discarded blazer these words: Morfin, wand, curse, Peverell, Slytherin.

Tom tosses his jacket under the rose bush.

Tom poses a dying Adonis.

Tom is found.

***

Tom appreciates and dearly, when the peasant gossip relays the discovery thereafter Merope Gaunt is lonesome.

Ever the chevalier, Tom intends to console a damsel in distress. She is your wood nymph, fairy child, cries his traitorous nature. Her sounds, scent, taste...

She runs to the door joining Tom, a cup in her hands. It smells of moonlit flowers and bitter tree bark. Of poison from never-seen creatures caught in the midnight zest. It smells of Merope, as she grew and now reaches Tom’s shoulders, and what may she taste like?

Eagerly, Tom drinks from the mug, where potion is a mere reflection of the real thing. Thus, Tom seeks the girl’s mouth, hard and soft in all the wrong places, and drinks more.

Then, Tom forgets.

***

Tom awakes in a dusky lit room, southern London. There is little about this room that Tom remembers. He knows neither day nor time. The place is a tribute to practicability and not - the better taste. Mentally, Tom begins to exchange furniture and redecorate walls. There is little light, and whilst Tom’s current state of headache appreciates shadows, Tom decides to move house altogether.  

“Drink?” Tom croaks. From behind his armchair, small dissonant hands bless Tom water. There is silence, as Tom drinks.

“Tom”, he knows this voice, far away voice, suddenly near. “I am a witch Tom. I have bewitched you Tom. I have bewitched you Tom. “

Tom nods, into the tactile silence. Her name is Merope, the fallen star. She is Tom’s witch. Tom’s little witch with a big belly. Needles crawl from Tom’s feet over his legs and up there. Tom has sensation.

“I... I am sorry, Tom. I should not have. I...” Tom turns his head, left, right. There is an exhaustive nothingness in Tom’s head, as if Tom stands on the top of a great fall. Then, Tom jumps.

“I am sorry... I can’t... I need... Air”, Tom cries and his feet move as he presses his hands to his face and it rains and rains. And he runs blind alleys in London, wet and wind and it rains. And Tom remembers.

***

From ever since Tom has known himself, Tom knew, he was special.

Aside from his all-purpose brilliance, Tom counts among his rarer gifts the ability to see beyond an invasive surface, when deciding how useful a thing and a person is. Consequentially, Tom assigns a personal worth based on how useful to Tom the person is. Merope is invaluable, as Merope possesses abilities a common human has not. Magic, from the first time Tom sees Merope, she is shrouded in a cloak of magic, dangerous, thrilling, dark. Tom knows best, how limited Merope’s skills are, as he watched the girl time and again to fail at the simplest of spells the moment she came to their clearing. Then, she rediscovers serenity and relearns aptitude.

Merope is down-to-earth. Tom’s wife has little appreciation of the futile vanities other women are prone to. She is, however, to follow Tom’s judgement, if there is a society to bedazzle the eyes of. In fact, the only vice Merope is hopelessly addicted to is, certainly, Tom. She shall do anything to please Tom. Free of the binding fear, her family invoked, Tom’s wife pleases Tom, because Tom she loves.

Tom expected a difference to follow the Gaunts’ arrest, yet Tom underestimated Merope. Power, delicious power emitted his girl, as she offered Tom the potion. How clever, how outstanding Tom’s girl!

Now, with a proper motivation and the financial support, add Tom’s theoretical understanding and creativity, Merope shall master magic, a magic to serve Tom. She is to become Tom’s magic. And their children, a boy certainly a boy, and two fervid witches. Depending on its nature, the magic’s nature, they are to reach the new heights, not yet known to the human race.

It is a pity that Tom wasted two years under the pull of the potion, as irresistible, as powerful, it had been. But there is change. Somehow, Tom knows that from now on Magic no longer controls Tom.

Instead, Tom dares to control Magic. 

***

Bells, church bells rouse Tom to the world around him, the tumultuous river and elated sunrise. Colour seeps into Tom’s skin, and his eyes roam the silver fog. Tom discovers the shivering in his legs, the iciness of his arms. In Tom’s mind there are possibilities, multiple calculations that lead to success, without limit, without failure. How fair the day that begun!

Tom walks by a family’s associate, withdraws means. Gets flowers and cake, and a fresh supply of Merope’s favourite brew. Magic tingles under Tom’s skin, beautiful, calling. 

Tom’s precious wife is not at home, when Tom arrives. At the first glance, everything is in place, she probably walking. The air is fresh, new life fresh. Later Tom reads a scribble in his wife’s uneven, childish hand – “Forgive me. I have always loved you”.

Merope left.

***

It is ridiculous, how apace and throughout a woman soon due vanishes. Then again, she is Tom’s woman, and underneath Tom’s anger, there slumbers pride. Deeper still, there hides despair.

It is a week that Merope escapes both the official and the hired searchers. Tom visits every place of his jetted memory that he walked before. Tom rages because of a single mistake, a miscommunication, as she trusted magic more than she trusted herself – but is not she magic? Tom now stands in the stinking mortuary, called to identify a body. The corpse is a pregnant female of maybe Merope’s height and mangled. It was hurt alive – the locket, she took the locket, supplies the uneasy mind, the body was lowered downstream. It knew hungry predators, the ignorant ships and the relentless air. Algae adorn its lost dark hair and raw flesh. Tom breaths the sweet, greasy smell of decomposition. 

It is a sensible conclusion that once Merope decides to leave this world, she turns a creature of water and foam. Little mermaid, it hardly was the three years.

Tom speaks not and search continues. Tom wakes up feeling slippery hands, crushing sweat. Listening to edacious water, Tom takes the train. Mother is overjoyed.

On the New Year’s Eve Tom wakes up.

On the New Year’s Day, icy and absolute, Tom gives himself to the waters, as Tom relocates to the continent.

***

Tom is a man of many names and occupations, there is hardly an accent to his speech and not a splash of grey to his hair. He plays in court and plays music. He is the chef technician and a newspaper correspondent and bon vivant. They are faces Tom sticks to his own perpetual face. Tom researches magic.

The past years have been disappointing.

Tom followed fairy tales and the folk lore. He walked along the ley lines, and drank from the holy wells. Touched the stones of Carnac, climbed the monuments of Giza. Met individuals of every genre and passions, few playing parts of witches and saints. But Merope, she was a natural contradiction.

Her dark purity, Tom feels, is best reflected in the single rock of green, frivolous vegetation, like a tooth it oversees rapid water. Tom has other business in Sankt Goarshausen, as he samples a bottle of Rhine valley wine. Through the layer of glass and the flickering candles Tom watches his target to amiably converse with a few of the more influential Nazi officers. Tom feels the taint in the man’s magic, and how his smiles are all surface. As a bad habit, the man’s not so decent hand keeps touching the peculiar stick of wood in the man’s pocket. He interests Tom, and anticipating the man’s retreat Tom places himself in the man’s way.

“Nice shape. Elder tree?” voices Tom, recollecting his own short foray into wand making. It is enough.

They are just outside the hotel, as Tom inquires in a polished German – “My Sir, forgive me the audacity, yet how to correctly commemorate a lost one of your kind?”

The man is tense and quick tempered. Tom stutters on, forcing his fingers to tremble – “You see, my wife... She was a Slytherin and a Peverell...”

Ah, success. The wizard’s attention centres on Tom as if a lock to a key. Tom visibly falters and takes a step back and three away. “Wait”, the man hisses and Tom is a subject to the familiar pull of mental compulsion. Alas, magic no longer controls Tom.

“Wait!”, the man pleads. “There is a ritual I researched.”

Tom half-turns his head in the direction of the blond wizard when the man expands – “Seeing that you long for a little guidance regarding our habits, I am to assume that your wife’s passing was quite sudden with words left unsaid. There is a ritual I researched for a friend of mine to help him to reconcile with his lost sister, tragic accident as it was. Nevertheless, as I now know my friend, he would deem this ritual... dirty”

“If you say so”, closer comes Tom when the wind howls. Tom benignly smiles. 

***

The girl is slender and tall, from a good middle class, considers Tom. She indulges in a cigarette, a veil of smoke surrounds her low back dress. Tom approaches her with light feet. “Fire?” suggests the girl.

A few pleasantries, a reassurance –

“My colleague? Everything in this town up and down the Rhine belongs to us tonight. All but a tiny spot we dutifully assign to this mad grumbler. Do not look at him, Darling”

Look at me.

Tom holds the girl’s head, their eyes meet. She is burning alive. Tom reminds – “How golden thy hair, Margarete”. She giggles at the last warning. He twists a hand in the girl’s curls. With precision Tom makes it so she no longer holds any weight of her own.

Up the Loreley rock Tom supports her.     

The other draws a series of runes. “Do you have a knife?” the other asks.

Tom sees the empty blue of the girl’s eyes the moment he slits her throat. She bleeds. The other speaks enchantments and waves with his wand.

Tom is within the ritual circle, Tom waits.

***

Slowly, as if a show dance, red liquid evaporates from Tom’s shirt and skin, from leaves and stone. Blood twirls in the air, congealing bubbles of raspberry and apple. Blood freshly heated equals desire. Blood caresses Tom’s impassive face, his outstretched arms. Promisingly, stars glow. The shore waves eat. 

She is a silhouette of melting ice, soft and distinguished, as she completes air. Tom holds his breath, Tom swallows traces of ruby monkshood, of claret seaweed, bordeaux tinted iron.

She is beautiful.

Her features - astable soft flow, eyes wet glistering. Mouth full and red, inviting mouth. Skin smooth, skin of blood, as it stretches over naked hips and the chest perfectly. Scarlet patterns and shapes, fluid, ever-changing, in motion, Merope gains an easiness she never had. She keeps the complexity.

She is a dream, red and violent. She tears through Tom’s beating heart and escapes Tom’s lips.

“Mine. You are mine, my dear. What have you done, leaving me?”

She touches the expanse of Tom’s chest and his cheeks lovingly. She cries salty tears, her tongue of red wine.

“I shall not share. I share not my possessions”, states Tom.

Her tongue to his lips, shy little tongue. Her eyes of a timeless adoration, of striking caress. She towers over a cooling corpse and sings a love song. Tom’s perfect girl.

Come closer still.

Hands on hips and hands on neck, and cherry lip kisses.

Starlight glows in Merope’s pellucid belly, exciting Tom. Softness and hardness, dark and dark, love.

“Where is the cloak, girl? There is the stone?”

Tom dissects the intruder in a thousand angry pieces, throws in the middle of Supernova, ignites with a fervent will. Merope, dear Merope, she flies high and fragile, and rains over the other man, and slips deep inside him, slips away. Then, she throttles.

She is a shapeless mass of blood and magic.

Tom runs.   

It is the other thing Merope promises Tom -

 “Safe yourself”

He reaches Britain meagre days before the naval blockade.

Before war.

***

Tom waits. In the great house of many windows, insistent tongues, Tom waits. It rains bombs over isles. Tom waits.

A family dinner, cold and moody. Tom waits.

Snowflakes cover dead grass, apathetically boring. Tom draws pages of black on black.

Tom feels no hunger, nor thirst.

He is tired to hit monochrome levers of melancholy sound to avoid the monotony.

He lives in the future he had not seen.

There stands a boy.

And each man kills the thing he loves.

***

The boy is polite. He has a hardy spine. His fingers stay in a fist. He is a shape in the two-way mirror. He exists.

Tom supports his head with a wrist joint. Tom drawls a honey prayer – “You love me most, little Tom. This glorified father, lounging in a big house, wearing finest silk, buying the rarest books, who never came. How you love me!”

Hardly a shift in appearance. “And you love me!”

Father is a guest to his inabilities, mother’s eyes run. Tom sits the farthest from the boy, - “Do not you love me? Will not you prove your love, little Tom? Prove it!

What is to fear?”

Love. The candles flutter in and out reality, like the washed out personae of Tom’s parents. This child has Tom’s face.

“Prove yourself, little Tom”.

A movement of the tongue and a longing.

Someone – mother cries needlessly rough – “Are you insane?!”

Tom has a most intimate knowledge of the dear Morfin’s wand this boy clings to as if a lifeline. He wears dear Morfin’s ring. He surpasses it all.

 The child has them, wild, wild eyes.

“What do you fear?”

Tom laughed, laughed blissfully. Tom was no more.

_“To such a moment past me fleeing,_

_Tarry, I'd cry, thou art so fair!_

_The traces of mine earthly being_

_Not countless aeons can outwear._

_Anticipating, here, its deep enjoyment,_

_Now I savour it, that highest moment."  
_

***

 _“_ _The first one_ _, he died for power. The other, he sought dead love. And the last one, he greeted death as an old friend.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Both the opening and the ending quotes are taken from „Faust“, a poem in two parts by the classical German writer J. W. von Goethe (and a mix of three different translations Sir Internet provided). 
> 
> Therein, Faust, a great restless medieval mind gets approached by the devil and as consequence sells his soul to the devil, the latter promising servitude for as long as Faust has not experienced a single moment of delightful, all-encompassing bliss. The opening lines thereby quote the contract, as voiced by Faust himself. Then, Faust is tempted – by wine, adventures, a young love (this golden haired Margarete that undeviatingly dies), a perfect love (Helena), a great many of eternal sights and philosophical discussions... Faust lives to an old age, and it is with the second quote that he fulfils the agreement – placing his happiness in a future he no longer has a part of. 
> 
> “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” is a line from Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. 
> 
> “Wild, wild eyes” is a description from J. Keats’ ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci”.
> 
> Further literature references were used and can be spotted in the text. 
> 
> ***
> 
> I have always held an eager interest in the persona of the elder Tom and his gothic romance with dear Merope. I think he can be trusted with more... ambition, than reflected in J.K. Rowling’s works, even if working within J. K. Rowling's timeline. This is an attempt.
> 
> ***
> 
> I am now writing the 16th chapter of "One and Only".


End file.
